About the Founder
The work I do isn’t about coaching. It’s about leading — when the stakes are real.
Real leadership reveals itself when the answers aren’t obvious and decisions carry structural impact.
This discipline is grounded in the doctrine of Dr. Lee Thayer — leadership as thinking, being, and doing under real conditions.
Leadership TBD work is not trend-based. It’s built on decades of operational rigor and the conviction that leadership begins where certainty ends.
Joelle Thayer
I work with leaders who’ve built something real — and are now confronting the limits of familiar thinking.
Before founding Leadership TBD, I spent three decades in organizations where performance was visible, margins were thin, and accountability was absolute. I carried responsibility for outcomes across operations, infrastructure, and systems that either held under pressure — or failed publicly. That reality informs the standard I hold today.
The leaders I work with are already successful. They are not looking for support. They are looking for sharper judgment.
The work is serious. Because the stakes are.
I was the only person personally trained — for nearly 40 years — by Dr. Lee Thayer, a merciless-yet-mirthful “professional cage rattler” and one of the great leadership thinkers of his era.
A Few Things I Believe About The Work
Perspective changes everything.
Thinking shapes reality.
Every decision teaches something.
Serious doesn’t mean joyless.
The right conversation changes what’s possible.
Rigor.
Presence.
Inquiry.
Consequence.
Precision.
Human.
Rigor. Presence. Inquiry. Consequence. Precision. Human.
About Dr. Lee Thayer
Dr. Thayer spent five decades defining the architecture of leadership — how thinking, communication, and systems determine performance under consequence.
He worked with executives, generals, and institutional leaders across industries, advancing a simple but uncompromising premise: leadership isn’t a skillset. It is a discipline of thinking, being, and doing.
His work established a standard — that results aren’t accidental. They are the product of how a leader thinks.
I was trained directly to that discipline — not as theory, but as practice under expectation. The work I do today is not imitation. It is application.
Leadership TBD exists as an applied expression of that standard — refined in live enterprise and tested through real decisions.
Carrying It Forward
This discipline endures because it is used.
It is not preserved. It is applied.
Every engagement. Every decision examined. Every question that sharpens understanding keeps the practice alive.
This is where the real work begins.